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The Equifax Breach Continues to Rage

Six months after a massive data breach at credit reporting company Equifax, Inc. handed hackers the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans, the fallout continues. Equifax first disclosed in September that hackers used a flaw in its website software to extract the personal information of as many as 145.5 million people. The stolen data included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver’s license numbers. In just the first two months following the breach, Equifax incurred $87.5 million of expenses, and that number is now expected to grow to $439 million by the end of 2018, making this, potentially, the most expensive reported data breach to date.

And the news keeps getting worse. On Thursday, Equifax said that more U.S. consumers were affected than originally disclosed. The company identified about 2.4 million additional U.S. consumers whose names and partial driver’s license information were stolen, and revealed that the consumers affected “were not in the previously identified” population of cyberattack victims. That brings the total number of U.S. consumers whose personal information was compromised by the breach to 147.9 million. This is the second time that Equifax has revised that number based on “continuing analysis.”